I bought it a while back on a friend’s recommendation. I should actually play it again solo, but at the time, I totally hated it; I just couldn’t connect with it. It was way too dark, hard to see what was even going on. And I couldn’t care less about the character I was playing or the gameplay mechanics. To me, it was just a fantasy reimagining of left4dead, but without the fun characters, with unintuitive level design, and just generally feeling kind of sloppy.

I might be being unfair, it’s been a long time since I played it.

We as a planet might be though.

There’s no guarantee that the US will be a cultural superpower going forward… (I think the US empire is likely to go the natural way of empires sooner than we may be ready for)

Well, it’s a shitty situation in a shitty country, that much is certain.

But there’s also a cost/benefit analysis to do here. They have to weigh the likelihood that Trump starts making their job harder, or even impossible to do vs the cost presented by the lack of clarity and possible loss of integrity that reporting like this introduces. Ultimately, they must have decided that it was better to do politically compromised reporting that let the story go unreported.

I mean it’s not a good situation for journalists in this country, I don’t envy them.

It’s a career. But you can age out of it, like pro sports.

Doesn’t pay as well as pro sports though…

There are also a huge number of minorities and immigrants, especially if you’re including CNAs.

I mean, they’re also putting all the facts they have in the story. They’re just adding official administration-aligned labels so that the powers that be leave them alone.

It’s like if a science teacher at a Catholic school did a whole unit on evolution, saying “God created this universe, including the amazing way that DNA mutation enables species to differentiate over long periods of time. We can thank God for this complex environment, which provides various ecological and geographical pressures that drive the process of evolution.” (Just throw in the key word they’re looking for a few times and get on with your job)

Well, while we’re on the topic here… I’m way more okay with applying Occam’s razor than Hanlon’s in this particular circumstance.

Normally I’m the first to advocate for patience and generally assuming the best of people. So I really do wish that anything about this seemed like negligence or ignorance, but with this administration, all I can see is malicious intent.

Wait, can you clarify that for me? Are you saying that you want to punch him in the face more than you want to punch anyone else on the planet? Or… are you saying that you more than anyone else on the planet, want to punch him in the face?

Cause it could be read either way… And while it might not seem like a huge distinction, if you meant the latter, you may have to get in line.

Be prepared for a long line…

I’ve always found this interesting. Human beings (or any vertebrates I suppose) are really more of a colony than a single being. And it’s not just a technicality, it’s meaningful. Much of that colony interacts with your nervous system and affects your moods and behavior. You think you have total control of your mind, but you would think and act differently with a different balance of gut bacteria. Chew on that for a while…

Yeah, the CIA is a constant problem. They spend a lot of money to spy on a lot of people in extraordinarily dumb and inefficient ways, including a lot of Americans (which to be clear, is both illegal and not their fucking job). They meddle in the affairs of foreign countries in ways that to my knowledge, have only ever worked in the best interest of dictators or terrorists. They actively subvert the separation of powers within the US government by wasting absurd amounts of funding to duplicate the capabilities that other agencies are supposed to be providing them…

Side note here, you know the fastest airplane ever made, the SR-71 blackbird? Well the CIA wanted some, but only the air force had them. There was a way for the CIA to officially request intel from the air force, but they didn’t want to do that, so they got lockheed to make them their own special version called the A-12. Now the Blackbird was also one of the most expensive planes to operate in history, the A-12 was not really any different in that regard. But in general, the air force had much more infrastructure to help keep costs to a minimum. Basically, the air force is good with planes. The CIA, they’re good at burning money and ignoring civil rights.

Don’t even get me started on the prism program. Fuck the CIA. Fuck mass surveillance. Get real jobs.

I mean, yeah. I’m with you 100%

Yeah, I might accept that.

Actually, I could use a new fridge…

Ok, who wants to pay me a subscription fee to give me a fridge? Get in line, I’ll only be accepting applicants today!

You not only paid for the refrigerator, but also the electricity and the internet access.

That’s a good point actually. You can eliminate these ads by taking it off the Wi-Fi.

It looks to me like he’s retiring, happy and rich.

Hey, if I’ve offended you, I do apologize for that, it truly wasn’t my goal. But I do strongly disagree (which is allowed).

And I think it’s pretty obvious that microtransactions could never, ever, possibly be more lucrative for Valve than selling games. It’s just a numbers thing. I mean, dlc can sometimes make more money than game sales for some titles, that’s a fact. But Valve has what, a dozen games that they could potentially sell dlc for? That’s a pretty hard limit. Whereas they also make money on every title sold in the store, and there are currently over 10,000 titles available from the steam store. That’s just like, a lot more than a dozen…

Um, no?

I guess this must be surprising to hear, but it’s just easier to sell content of actual value than bullshit. Yeah… some people will buy bullshit, and yeah, one can take advantage of those people, but having actual products is still a better business model.

But hey, if you’ve got these things all figured out, totally start your own game studio/global digital distribution system. Go make bank on microtransaction garbage.

I mean, they get a sizable cut from the majority of games sold on PC. I think that’s their business model.

I hear you about loot boxes and skins and stuff. It’s just, that has to be a small part of their total profit.

The picture isn’t great, but I’ll bet the framerate is amazing!

That’s a good post, and you’re right about nearly all of it. I’m with you all the way until your conclusion.

Without the experience of building and sustaining an underwater base, we die on Mars, if we can even get there in the first place.

A few things, first, there’s no doubt that we could have gotten there in the 60s we had the technology then, and we still do. But that’s obviously not the hard part.

Second, no part of a sustained base in space requires a base underwater, they’re a mostly different set of challenges. Honestly, I expect time will tell on this one (and pretty soon), the US and China are both racing to put a base on the moon, nobody to my knowledge, is planning a deep sea base.

And it’s quite understood that the moon is a stepping stone, if you can find water there, that’s the essential material needed to sustain life. But it’s also exactly what you need to produce rocket fuel. If you create a spacecraft capable of getting to the moon, refuelling there would allow you to get to anywhere else in the solar system. So while an underwater base could teach some of these lessons, I expect that In practice, a moon base will teach us how to live everywhere else in space. Because not only is that closer to the goal, it’s what we’re actively doing.

Yeah, that’s pretty great. I really want to believe that’s 100% true and not an exaggeration in any way. Tuffy for the win.